The finding, which has implications for antibiotics' diminished efficacy, translates to about 47 million unnecessary prescriptions given out each year across the country to children and adults. Most of these are for conditions that don't respond to antibiotics, such as colds, sore throats, bronchitis, flu and other viral illnesses.
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The overuse of antibiotics has led to the frightening rise of drug-resistant superbugs in recent years...
A study by researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine says medical errors should rank as the third-leading cause of death in the United States — and highlights how shortcomings in tracking vital statistics may hinder research and keep the problem out of the public eye.
The authors, led by Johns Hopkins surgeon Dr. Marty Makary, call for changes in death certificates to better tabulate fatal lapses in care. In an open letter, they urge the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to immediately add medical errors to its annual list reporting the top causes of death.
Based on an analysis of prior research, the Johns Hopkins study estimates that more than 250,000 Americans die each year from medical errors. On the CDC’s official list, that would rank just behind heart disease and cancer, which each took about 600,000 lives in 2014, and in front of respiratory disease, which caused about 150,000 deaths.
Medical mistakes that can lead to death range from surgical complications that go unrecognized to mix-ups with the doses or types of medications patients receive.
But no one knows the exact toll. In significant part, that’s because the coding system used by CDC to record death certificate data doesn’t capture things like communication breakdowns, diagnostic errors and poor judgment that cost lives, the study says.
The traditional balance of strong law and weak surveillance technology has been disrupted on both fronts since the arrival of cheap computing power and the global Internet. Today, the rule of law in the area of privacy is relatively weak, but technology shows surprising strength. First, weakness and gaps in both privacy and surveillance law have grown. Since the emergence of the Internet and smartphones, the US Congress has not managed to update consumer privacy law at all, and even changes in sectoral laws governing health and finance have been limited. Our most important surveillance laws, Title III and ECPA, remains frozen in the pre-Internet 1980s, and arguably even took a step backward with the Patriot Act.
...New information technology mostly tips its hand toward the possibility of great privacy intrusion. So our only option to restore the proud place of the rule of law is to be very explicit about what privacy protections we want with respect to both government and private action. First, we need to be very specific about the privacy-utility balance we expect with respect to specific uses of personal data. With the passage of CISA, for example, there will an increased flow of cybersecurity threat information to the government. Some of this will be personal data and some may be potential evidence of crimes. As DHS makes rules about how the personally identifiable information component of threat data is handled, it is important that there be very clear rules that limit onward usage and storage of threat data. Those rules have to be clear enough to set expectations with citizens about what will and will not be done with personal data.
Second, rules must be designed so that they can be enforced in large-scale data flows. CISA is but one context in which the volume of data flow requires that rules be susceptible to machine-assisted accountability. As Susan Hennessey argued yesterday, it is not reasonable to expect manual human review of every transaction, so rules must be sufficiently concrete that computers can automatically identify those transactions that are clearly compliant with the rules, and those that are clearly not. Human judgment can come into place for any transactions that fall into a gray area.
The second way in which it is rigged is our trade policy. First there is the size of the trade deficit. This is the result of policy choices. Instead of forcing our trading partners to respect Bill Gates copyrights and Pfizer's patents, we could have insisted they raise the value of their currency to move towards more balanced trade. But Bill Gates and Pfizer have more power in setting trade policy than ordinary workers.
Also, contrary to what Mankiw tries to tell folks in his column, the trade deficit did play a big role in our loss of manufacturing jobs. As my favorite graph for the day shows, manufacturing employment was roughly constant at around 17,500 million from the late 1960s until 2000. During this period, there was substantial growth in manufacturing productivity, as Mankiw says. This growth caused manufacturing employment to decline as a share of total employment, but to remain roughly constant in absolute terms.
However, from 2000 to 2006 manufacturing employment falls by more than 3 million, or close to 20 percent. The change was the explosion in the size of the trade deficit, as an over-valued dollar made our goods less competitive. This plunge in employment devastated lives and whole communities. It was a clear policy choice. Importers like Walmart and outsourcers like GE benefited, as ordinary workers lost big-time.
...for example, the laws that forbid car companies from selling directly to consumers, creating a vast industry of middlemen. You can also find clear examples of careless bureaucratic overreach and inertia, like the total ban on sonic booms over the U.S. and its territorial water (as opposed to noise limits). These inefficient constraints on perfectly healthy economic activity must reduce the size of our economy by some amount, acting like sand in the gears of productive activity.
The question is how much. Hardcore free-marketers often claim that the cumulative effect of regulation is very large, and that dramatic cuts in regulation could boost economic growth for many years. The problem is that it’s very hard to find solid evidence to back up this assertion. If regulation is less harmful than the free-marketers would have us believe, we risk concentrating our attention and effort on a red herring. But because regulations are all very different, and they act on different industries, simply getting an idea of the overall cost of regulation is a daunting task...
Several interesting graphics, including one where you can see how your district tanks. And a whole bunch of questions, with the depressing note that not all things are equal in education:
What emerges clearly in the data is the extent to which race and class are inextricably linked, and how that connection is exacerbated in school settings.
Not only are black and Hispanic children more likely to grow up in poor families, but middle-class black and Hispanic children are also much more likely than poor white children to live in neighborhoods and attend schools with high concentrations of poor students.
These schools can face a myriad of challenges. They tend to have more difficulty recruiting and keeping the most skilled teachers, and classes are more likely to be disrupted by violent incidents or the emotional fallout from violence in the neighborhood. These schools often offer fewer high-level classes such as Advanced Placement courses, and the parents have fewer resources to raise extra money that can provide enhanced arts programs and facilities.
This self-segregation of a privileged fifth of the population is changing the American social order and the American political system, creating a self-perpetuating class at the top, which is ever more difficult to break into.
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In hard numbers, the percentage of families with children living in very affluent neighborhoods more than doubled between 1970 and 2012, from 6.6 percent to 15.7 percent.
At the same time, the percentage of families with children living in traditional middle class neighborhoods with median incomes between 80 and 125 percent of the surrounding metropolitan area fell from 64.7 percent in 1970 to 40.5 percent.
Reardon and Bischoff write:
Segregation of affluence not only concentrates income and wealth in a small number of communities, but also concentrates social capital and political power. As a result, any self-interested investment the rich make in their own communities has little chance of “spilling over” to benefit middle‐ and low-income families. In addition, it is increasingly unlikely that high‐income families interact with middle‐ and low‐income families, eroding some of the social empathy that might lead to support for broader public investment in social programs to help the poor and middle class.
Still, there is something about the U.S.: Nearly half of Americans would not be able to come up with $400 in savings in an emergency, according to a Federal Reserve study cited in The Atlantic's cover story this month. America’s poor and its middle class live on the razor’s edge of financial security through their working years and are uniquely ill-prepared for retirement. The United States finished 19th for three consecutive years in a global analysis of retirement security, behind Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Canada, and 13 European countries.
So, why don’t Americans save money? A complete answer should take into consideration three things:
(1) Since the phenomenon is new, its cause must be new.
(2) Since the decline in savings among rich countries is global, its cause must be global.
(3) Since America’s poor and middle class are so especially ill-prepared for retirement, there must be something “special" about America...